Cobb

Suicide: Erasing White Privilege Since 1994

Deaths by Suicide By Race Los Angeles County, 1994 - 2003   Race   All Races   White   Black Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islander Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* 2003 727 8 442 12 55 6 163 4 65 5 2002 727 8 401 11 72 8 171 4 81 6 2001 762 8 443 13 51 6 188 5 78 6 2000 711 8 434 12 57 6 155 4 61 5 1999 732 8 449 13 52 6 154 5 75 5 Because of changes to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), 1994-1998 may not be comparable to 1999-2003. 1998* 794 9 510 14 65 7 156 5 62 7 1997* 776 9 474 13 59 7 166 5 75 7 1996* 873 10 537 15 72 8 181 5 81 7 1995 954 11 610 17 82 9 188 6 72 7 1994 902 10 559 15 72 8 199 5 71 7

 

I know that people like this guy want to make white Americans feel guilty about all the racism that is harshing the mellow of people of color. And of course everybody in the nation is in tune with the outrage of a single needless death. But you might wonder, given all of that, what kind of penalty the white collective hive mind should pay for its evil and sinister oppression. Well, how about death? Better yet how about suicide?

Turns out that in LA County, white Americans have been killing themselves off at double the rate of blacks and at triple the rate of hispanics. 

Who would dare call this justice?

And in case you didn't know, there are about 17,000 murders every year in America. There are about 30,000 suicides. Satisfied?

The Economics of the Science is In

I'm liking the mocking of English of the credulous. That's why I left it at 'the Trayvon Martin'. Anyway, since I've turned off my economic radar, I had to do a little remembering back on whom I used to read for those several years and I found the following off Mankiw's blog:

Today's Blackification

Trayvon Martin is a punctuation mark in the book of life. A comma, or perhaps a semicolon. His erasure upsets grammarians, and a bad sentence is a bad sentence, but I'm reading above syntax. 

In fact, for blackification purposes, one might be curious to know that one such as myself is not particularly influenced by the fate of random black teenagers in random southern towns. So I swear to you this moment that I don't know the name of the any of the Jena Six and cannot recall the name of Shaquanda Cotton's Texas town.  It was Texas, wasn't it? Such snuffed candles do not light my path through history with all due respect to John Donne. 

However there are some blackfolks I've been considering of late whose fate seems lost to the hoodie class and their fetish defenders. As I might have mentioned, I'm spending more time thinking about aerospace, rocket science and the long now. A couple weeks ago I bought a 5 disc boxed set of video covering NASA starting with Friendship 7. I recall actually meeting several black astronauts when I was in college when such matters were important to me. But just to remind you where I'm coming from with regard to blackfolks... When I was a freshman, I went to the library and grabbed a copy of Who's Who Among Black Americans. There were something on the order of 35,000 entries in that book. I basically swore that day that my social involvement was done - if the only black people I met were people from that book, I would be perfectly happy. After all, I did have to get married one day. So I did in fact meet Guy Bluford, Ron McNair and Mae Jemison. And then that was done. 

Several others are at Wikipedia which is of course doing a better job of putting such things in front of the public than any of the so-called black leaders. There are 14 who have been in space, 11 more than once. But on any day at any college campus, you'll probably find more professors who can sing the lyrics to Gil Scott Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" than name five black astronauts. Hell, I know the lyrics to Whitey on the Moon and I still haven't memorized the names. But my priorities are straight.

I'm secondarily impressed with the progress of my own family. My son has been accepted into the business program of Cal State Fullerton, which was legendarily run by a woman by the name of Jewel Plummer Cobb. No relation but her biography is no joke. Look it up one day. She too was about the hard sciences. We'll see about Boy, he's recently attracted to economics and Freakonomics in particular. The Scholar is insisting on taking challenging courses for her senior year as she bucks up her already nice GPA, and the Sprite is breaking her own records in track. She's a sprinter, hurdler and long jumper. 

But I've come to meet another branch of the family that goes back to the old days in New Haven, who have been doing quite well for themselves for quite some time. I'll call him Uncle Mack because what I've come to know about him leaves me with little doubt that somewhere in one of his many closets is a full length mink coat. Uncle Mack lives one of the most exclusive suburbs in New Jersey in a castle of his own design. So far as I can tell those ceilings are 20 feet above ground and there's at least 6,000 square feet on the first floor. Uncle Mack wears French cuffs at home and reminesces about the days when Atlantic City was newly revitalized and high rollers actually tucked in their shirts. I brought up the Tyson Spinks fight on my iPad.

There used to be a club on Amsterdam Avenue that was all that when I lived in NY. I met Mike Tyson there and found I was a half inch taller. When you go back to those days, when Eddie Murphy filmed 'Boomerang', there wasn't a black American living who didn't have some metaphor of black power that didn't include Mike Tyson. He was the unstoppable force and the inevitable symbol. Uncle Mack loved to see him fight in Vegas and Atlantic City and had good seats, but not as good as some Jamaican drug dealers. There's always a bigger fish, but not always a better flavor. Uncle Mack has done better with his wealth than Iron Mike.

Finally, I've been considering the possibility that Condi Rice might find herself on Romney's short list for Veep. Either way, I listened to an hour long interview through the Hoover Institute and found how easily she grasps the motions of the geopolitical world. She is one of the great women of our time, who stepped up and made her mark. She has returned with passion to Stanford and is certainly the only living Secretary of State who bothers to teach undergraduates. I'd say the future is bright.

I know why it is difficult for some black Americans to keep their eyes on any prize worth having. They have been distracted by those in control of short attention span theatre, who are by definition not interested in knowledge. But I have plenty of confidence that human nature triumphs and that people will unplug from nonsense when the time is right.  I'm not on a mission any longer to prove something or even exemplify something about a proper blackness. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. I am a writer, and this is what I'm thinking about black America today.

Oh yeah, and I hear Tiger had a good game, and I realized that Ron Artest lives in my neighborhood, and I'm feeling Lewis Hamilton not being happy with 3rd place.

Deuling Tesla Coils

This actually reminds me of Close Encounters.

The Ballad of the (Non) Conservative

I hung out with an old friend the other day and he said some things that reminded me, although he's Jewish, of stuff my old black friends say all the time. It has a chorus that doesn't particulary annoy me, but it gets my attention. It goes a little something like this.

 

I haven't seen anyone get the chair that didn't deserve it yet.
No, I don't believe abortions should be so very easy to get. 
And what kind of fool believes that you can spend your way out of debt?

That's how I feel, but don't call me conservative.

I should be able to send my kids to any school I choose.
Immigrants should be instant citizens if they pay armed forces dues.
Don't get me started about exported jobs, that always gives me the blues.

Just keeping it real, but don't call me conservative.

Yes I pay too much in taxes, and it doesn't make me feel any better if some millionaire pays more.
Public school education is a joke, and half the women on TV are dressed like a whore.
The federal deficit is obscene and nobody really knows the score.

You know that's the deal, but don't call me conservative.

Politicians must think I'm stupid to believe their every lie.
If Bin Laden had bombed the Statue of Liberty Afghanistan would fry
I used to like Obama, but now I'm not so sure about that guy.

That's what I know, but don't call me conservative.

I got nothing against gays, I don't see what's the big deal.
I pull my weight and I don't hate, you don't hear me squeal.
Some times I wish an ordinary guy could be the squeaky wheel.

Just call me Joe, but don't call me conservative. 

They legalize maraijuana but not a new pipeline for gas
Going to the moon in a rocketship is now seen as a thing of the past
And all I hear about China is that they're going to own my ass

If I'm mad at that, does that make me conservative?

 

Bookchin Seeing Me

 

An artist named Natalie Bookchin has sampled Cobb Video as part of her project entitled "Now he's out in public and everyone can see".

 

Now he's out in public and everyone can see is an 18-channel video installation that weaves together found fragments from online video diaries in which vloggers recount a series of media scandals involving African American men. The multiple stories, originally circulated and enflamed by networks of corporate and viral media, intersect around themes of racial and class identity. Together they form a collective-told narrative that explores popular attitudes, anxieties, and conflicts about race. The work aims to create a critical context for otherwise isolated and scatter-shot online voices, drawing links, making connections, and locating tropes between individual rants, responses, and interpretations. The montage produced by the multiple monitors in the gallery space mirrors the composite story, as well as the composite racialized subject under scrutiny. Where the typical viewer of online video is a single isolated person in front of her screen, the installation produces an active social space where multiple viewers interact with and complete the narrative as they navigate the space. 

Folks informed me yesterday that my mug was in the LA Times and so it is true. As far as I can tell, she's taken samples from my Kwanzaa Contextualized video shown below in its entirety. 

 

I checked out the video last night and I think it holds up rather well after all of these years. I've essentially said just about all I have passion to say on the subject of Kwanzaa and as far as I can tell, the controversy has waned over the years. I can't tell for sure but I don't get many hits on that stuff as it swings around into focus - surely no comments. It's odd though that the video only has a couple dozen hits. I'll put this and that out on G+ and see what percolates up this week.

Meanwhile, Bookchin's other work that I was able to sample was very clever and smoothly edited. It was about people getting fired and I think it demonstrates the remarkable similarities that we experience in our encounters with trying to be useful. I'll keep an eye out for Bookchin.

Social Capital

 

 

I myself find cricket to be too damned dangerous, but I do love dressing in white. Here in Los Angeles it's about that time.

I'd only like to say that when I was a freshman in college, I was a transparently hard core preppie and for all the ridicule I suffered, I would have sacrificed a toe to be the dude on the cover of a Ralph Lauren catalog. I still have a pair of Rockports from back then and I cannot remember ever wearing them with socks. Now that I look at them, I see that I have finally wore a hole in the sole. Ah pity.

Clearly it has become no big deal for people like me to be our remarkable selves, and it's nice to have legions of homies just below us socially to affirm that our exceptionality is merely ordinary distinction, and not some freakish oddity.

Still, I prefer Eddie Bauer and Johnston & Murphy.

Startup Money After Bad

When I see reasonably intelligent and civilized young, single people who talk with upspeak my immediate reaction is 'Val'. For my international readers, a Val is short for Valley. You may be familiar with the term. If not, check out the YouTube.

So I watched this attractive young woman on television - one of those tech talk shows, and she started spewing about her experience at forgettably cutesy spelled dot com which was funded. Funded means you and 12 other twentysomethings with a cool idea managed to convinced somebody with 100 million dollars that you're worth 4.5 million and you have a year to prove it. And 85% of you fail, some spectacularly - meaning you make it for 3 years and get another 40 people and 12 million dollars and *then* fail. It's a story as old as most old dogs.

What surprised me was how instantly it occured to me that she and 12 of her friends would be an unlucky 13 as soon as she started speaking. The very idea of of spending about five million bucks on any endeavor headed by people with less than 5 years work experience, no kids, overpriced undergraduate educations and caffiene fetishes just seems ridiculous right off the bat. And yet we all know it happens. It happens a lot. It shouldn't happen much at all - but it's how a lot of us think about money and work.

There is a small part of me that wants to start a conversation: The only reason I'm not a Silicon Valley millionaire is because... But I don't want to go there or even think I'm going there. It just seems obvious to me that certain things ought to fail. I'm pessimistic today. 

Be Careful What You Wish

You might just become predictable. 

Two Notes from the Encroaching United Police States of America

Note One:

Progressive Insurance (run by a noted political Progressive) has introduced 'Snapshot', which is a device that you snap into your automobile to 'prove' that you are a safe driver. It obviously collects telemetry and throws your human experience over the transom to some digital Wizard of Oz algorithm that determines what discount you should get. 

Note Two:

We have been notified by the City of Redondo Beach the dates, times and locations of Christmas Tree recycling. The Spousal Unit called in this morning to verify the times and then was prompted into giving her name, address and homeowner status. It started to sound like a 911 call, but we just wanted to know why the trashman didn't pickup the tree. 

Short Brains

I saw an excellent quote today that was narrowly focused at the guys at Lytro, and it's something I had an inkling of when I saw the last video I watched of them. Check out the quote from G+:

..I get frustrated when engineer-oriented folks try to design things without thinking about the history, legacy, existing interaction rituals, behaviors and relevancy to normal humans and basically make things for themselves, which is fine — but then don’t think for a minute about the world outside of the square mile around Palo Alto. It could be so much better if ideas like this were workshopped, evolved, developed to understand in a more complete way what “light field imaging” could be besides something that claims camera-ness in a shitbox form-factor with an objectionable sharing ritual and (probably — all indications suggest as much) a pathetic resolution/mega-pixel count. 

 

 

I now coin the term 'short brains'. These are those folks who are bright enough to figure out that bourgios conventions don't necessarily apply to themselves, but have not enough respect for history and the way ideas, skills and powers manifest themselves through societies.

The President Sings

I actually did not believe I would see this in my lifetime. <br><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/T-hDt2E8MoE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Meme Alert: Avoid Ghetto

Just so you know we are living in Orwellian times, you have to understand the codewords for the people who decypher the codewords meant for people who communicate in codewords. In other words, beware of calling people who look for race racist because it will get you called a racist. It's all a conspiracy. And now I am participating just to get a word in edgewise before the nonsense of this latest blather in the chatting classes goes viral. 

You see, last week, Microsoft was awarded a patent for an add-on technology for GPS that routes you to where you want to go depending on what you wish to avoid or consider. Today those people are saying those people are enabling those other people to be what they already are, racist!

Long ago, before the GPS satellites were in place and only truck drivers for big logistics company, it was considered quite the computing miracle to get a machine to determine the shortest route between two points on a map. But now anybody can get that for free. Why not add value to map routing by including some crime stats or demographic stats or weather stats or traffic stats? Or better yet, to quote from the patent's text:

..resolving conflicts between an information source with a financial interest and an informations source without a finacial interst and producing a direction set based upon the information source that does not have a financial interest in providing the direction set; collecting information concerning routes of other people, and using the collected information to update the pedestrian-based rout in real time.

In other words, social GPS routing, so you can pick the way to the beach that your friends go, or so you can pick the non-profit route, or you can basically do the Aerosmith remake of your choice and Walk This Way. 

I expect that the technology is obviously pretty cool, but since guys like me who are skeptical and analytical are a demographic minority, Microsoft and its licensees are going to need some cute and expensive marketing to overcome 'avoid ghetto' and its Orwellian 'racist' implications. 

Of course we've been through this before with the NUDnicks, and we'll probably see it again from this shallow generation. But you know the technology is there so it's just a matter of time before it is wired to do what this blockhead person suggests: 

"A more useful app would be for young black men to be able to map blocks with the highest risks of their being pulled over or stopped on the street by police," Chinn said. "That phenomenon affects many more people than the rare occurrences of random violence against motorists driving through 'bad' neighborhoods."

How about the Ice Cube Social GPS? 

 

It doesn't take more than a moment's thought to recognize that the blockhead gut reaction has already been satisfied by various Bulworthian ghetto tours. Or has gangsta video disappeared from the airwaves? And doesn't anybody remember the overblown Detroit meme? Isn't this all Michael Moore's fault anyway?

Brad & Amy Talk about Sex

Here.

I riff off the following:

Imagine two rowboats, both adrift at sea. The first rowboat has no oars. They can see an island in the distance. Somebody calculates the distance to it, and the rate at which they're drifting, and concludes that they have only half the food and water they'll need for everybody to reach the island. The conclusion is obvious*: at least half of them have to be thrown overboard. And the sooner it happens, the fewer of them will have to die.

Now imagine the other rowboat. It has plenty of food and water, and it has oars, but it has a different problem: it's leaking, and fast. Somebody does the math, and they conclude that they can all make it to the island in the distance. But they can only make it if everybody who can row, rows, and if everybody else bails water as fast as they can, and if they cooperate in sharing the rowing, bailing, and resting cycles; if anybody is selfish, if anybody doesn't cooperate, nobody will make it.

Call the first rowboat "America." Call the second rowboat "the Netherlands."

That's the metaphor that came to my mind after spending a couple of days deciding how to explain Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex, by Amy Schalet (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Even though the book has nothing to do with rowboats, and only indirectly to do with the overall differences between Americans and the Dutch. What the book is really about is the regulation of teenage sex by their parents. You see, as someone who grew up in both the Netherlands and the US, baffled by the differences between the two, and who went on to do her Ph.D. research in the sociology of adolescent/parent relationships, Schalet has dedicated an entire book to trying to explain a major difference between two different cultures that were substantially identical as late as the late 1950s: democratic capitalist republics who won their independence from colonial imperial masters around the same era, dominated by conservative Protestants, who went through the same Great Depression and two World Wars, and the same sexual revolution when contraception and antibiotics were made widely available, and the same economic shock after the OPEC crisis. But in the years after that, huge social differences appear, and Schalet concentrates, as her academic speciality, on one of them.

 

I generally don't like to compare America with little Scandinavian countries because I believe the the matter of scale requires that every sociological subject have a different class of solution. But...

It's easy for me to see that the concept of a 'proper family' is what's guiding parents. Speaking as an American with three teens living at home, my answer has been to stress abstinence before adulthood. I do not see any benefit whatsoever in allowing people who are not consenting adults to act as if they were. In other words, I use the term 'statutory rape'. In the same way, I don't particularly expect that the experience of a babysitting job adequately prepares anyone for being in the workforce. In short, my attitude about teen sex is that more people are talking about it than are actually doing it, and those who are doing it are doing it all wrong.  The idea that taking all of the risk out of the consequences that might lead to a shotgun wedding or herpes via a safety net sounds Orwellian to me. I like the idea that sex is complicated and dirty - that getting naked is not easy and casual.

I expect at long last that the results of the sexual revolution in the West will turn out to show a skew in our societies as much as the One Child policy in China. It is inconceivable to me that the historical norm has been so out of touch with reality and that the benefits of feminism are simple but have been overweighted. In short, I don't believe in social liberation through sexual freedom, but rather through the evolution of property rights. Women and children are not property and freeing them from those traditional constraints were necessary and sufficient to greater liberty - however to assert the additional demands of radical feminism (ie to properly have men 'deal with their female side', or question the roles of men & women in family life) was a gross error with significant detrimental consequences for the concept of family. And I think it is becoming more clear that having women think of sex outside of marriage as a liberating thing has worked primarily to the advantage of polygamous men.  

So the very idea that this is a lifeboat kind of situation begs the question of the centrality of sexuality in our humanity and exactly what sort of benefits we have gained by focusing on upending our attitudes and trying new practices. It is my opinion that focus on sexuality tends to be dysfunctionally individualistic, and so it is not surprising that it brings into question those sacrifices necessary for family stability. Why is teen sex so important? I think it has to do with the improper way many Westerners conceive of freedom.

 

Siri Is Racist!

Or is it me?

American Meritocracy: Bunny Slopes & Black Diamonds

What could be more ambitious, I was asked, than democratization of access and genuine objective meritocracy?

It must be the ambition of any rational people to establish and maintain such institutions that guarantee these goals for their citizens. But I want to overemphasize the necessity for leagues and limit the attention spent on the ideal of equality. I say you don't want one level playing field, but several. And those several level playing fields are classes. 

When I brought this up with The Brothers the other night, Doc made it crystal in one phrase: That's what neighborhoods are for. 

• You don't want to get into the ring with Mike Tyson.
• You don't want to try to hit fastballs from Randy Johnson
• You don't want to get into an argument with a lawyer who gets paid 2 million a year.

 

Obama's Curious Secrets

Civil libertarians everywhere are up in arms about the way in which the Obama administration has continued to extend and expand the ability to prosecute American citizens who are variously described as terrorists. The PATRIOT act has not been sunsetted, the TSA is still practicing its security theatre unabated, drone attacks continue without boots on the ground and even the law about how secrets are classified was almost classified. 

Throughout all of this, hawks on the Right like me are mystified at the lack of continuity by Obama to speak about dealing with the enemies of America forthrightly as his predecessor did. And most recently I've heard that the DOD has termed the deadly attack at Fort Hood as 'workplace violence'. 

My conclusion is that Obama wants America to have all the powers GWBush did, except he wants none of the political flack that comes with justifying those powers for the sake of Bush's Long War. The effect is simply worse for democracy, and for me it takes on Orwellian sinister overtones. 

GWBush was a cowboy. Obama is a spy. 

He is as slippery now as he was back then. It is his worst fault. He is the Situational President.

The Fungibles

Edited by M.D.C.Bowen last updated January, 2003

---

The following is a list of the only black people that count in America. You know it, I know it, so let's just get over it and admit it. You want details of why? Check out the Isbell Theory below. You want it more scholarly like? Try Bell's Rules.

---

 

OJ Simpson	Johnnie Cochran	Colin Powell	Thomas Sowell	Shelby Steele	Michael Jordan	John McWhorter	Bill Cosby	Condi Rice	JC Watts
Alan Keyes	Maxine Waters	Louis Farrakhan	Jesse Jackson	Al Sharpton	Khalid Muhammed	Cynthia McKinney	Spike Lee	Charles Barkely	Denzel Washington
Halle Berry	Barry Bonds	Willie Horton	Will Smith	Puff Daddy	Tupac Shakur	Cornel West	Skip Gates	Oprah Winfrey	Tiger Woods
Ward Connerly	Chris Rock

Each of these individuals represent some opinion, character flaw or character strength against which all African Americans are judged.

The Isbell Theory
Charles Isbell October 1995 
There is a Black Leadership vaccuum... but it's not for Black folks, it's for White folks. The leader and messiah being sought is *not* being sought by Black people, but by White people. The mainstream wants a national Black leader--a spokesperson really--so they can have someone to point to, someone to reason with, be angry at, hold onto, respect, hate or whatever, but make no mistake, it is a leader for *their* sakes, not for the sakes of Black people. By contrast, Black America is happy to go on being the non-monolithic people we've always been and to address our issues locally, individually and internally. I don't think we have a messiah fixation or a particular desire for a national leader.

Sure, Jackson is respected for having done something and some folks will follow him, but that does not a Black National Leader(tm) make, as should be obvious. Farrakhan is respected as the head of an organization that has shown some concern for the community and has actually made some inroads in addressing a particular set of problems and some folks will follow him, but so what?, that still does not a Black National Leader(tm) make. Colin Powell? Oh, please. Cochran? Oh, he won one for the gipper, but a spokesperson? Sorry, I don't want one, I gave at the office.

Having said that, I should point out that what Blacks do seem to searching for is a symbol--not a person--that makes our oppression clear. The Rodney King beating is a symbol that says "SEE! We told you about the cops!" but nothing more. Mark Furhman serves the same purpose. It is important to realize that this is a search for an event so powerful that White folks cannot ignore what we know is true; it is *not* a search for a leader, a Moses, a Messiah.

Now, to the extent that an individual can articulate our frustration, our fears and make the event clearer, we are grateful, but I don't think we're really searching for a person to do that because, well, there's no leadership vaccuum we need filled.

Why is all this important? Well, it says something about the way the nation views its Black population. We are, essentially, aliens, a group whose experiences, culture and world is so foreign--and monolithically so--that the rest of the country needs some person to bridge the perceived gap.

Sadly, there is a gap of perception, but there isn't a person who is going to articuate it for America and make it plain (especially since this isn't even what the country wants; the country wants a Black leader who will make Black people understand the country, not the other way around). The only way to fill this gap is to listen to the masses and what they are saying in common and in discord to you everyday, not to look for one voice to provide you with a soundbite. The only way to deal with this gap is accept your own responsibility in bridging it.

As to the MMM, its center role in all this is ironic. For Farrakhan, this may have been about White America--I don't know and I don't care, really--but for the rest of the folks there, this wasn't about White folks at all. It was about Black folks. I don't think we were sending a message to White America, though there is one there for White America, we were just talking amongst ourselves. America, we were just talking amongst ourselves.

 

Have a Geeky Thanksgiving

A Rude Question About Third World Diets

Today I have the squirts. 

The reason is plain. There was a sale on Powerade at Smart and Final and so I bulked up. I'm very sure that I'm getting at least 40oz of hydration a day by drinking two bottles. That and my Red Bulls.

So it occurs to me, as I'm running through Charmin that in countries without toilet paper, the squirts must be an order of magnitude more.. umh, well shitty. Especially in those countries where young children dehydrate and die from diarrhea. So if I didn't have Handi Wipes handy, I would probably want to drink a lot less water and eat a lot more meat. If I gotta poop and hand-wipe, I want to poop out pebbles.

So there's my Freakonomic question for the day. Does the diet in poor countries skew towards foods that make pooping more round, firm and fully packed, or maybe do they prefer a more liquid consistency? Or does the left hand not even enter into the general vicinity of the question?

Spank!

posted without comment.

The Bastards of Class Boundary Transgressions

I watched a lecture by Richard Stallman this morning and it was brilliant, and then I watched another by him and it was awful. The difference was that in the first one he was summarizing the lessons of his work and life and in the second one he set himself up as an example.

The problem with self-righteousness is related to another problem that I understand but have not yet given it a term. I'm usually pretty good at doing so, but this particular phenomenon escapes my ontology. It will take a minute to explain. 

We all know that hackers can own our computers. But they don't. Why? Because we're not worth it. And even if they steal 10 million credit cards, it's not really a profitable business. Why? because the average Joe doesn't have that much credit. We are beneath the radar. It's safe to be ignorant because ignorant people aren't particularly dangerous. That's the phenomenon. Let me describe it one more way. If you are the ordinary Joe and you wear jeans and a t-shirt it's not a scandal, but it would be if you were a UN diplomat. 

Let's call it, for the time being, the Class Boundary Scrutiny Problem. 

Stallman, in his odious lecture was explaining how Apple Computer was closed and proprietary and for that reason he would not even accept an iPad as a gift. He did a little browbeating of a person who brought up the question about a jailbroken iPhone, the questioner was being a little obsequious and Stallman was being a little self-righteous. 

When you are a tenured professor, you have the luxury of time to develop the skill of not using many cultural idioms. You can speak directly from knowledge without the necessity for idioms. But for most people in the world, we are trying to find ways and means to secure our lives. And the world is very complicated and doesn't readily yeild up sinecures like tenure. So we search. And in our searching we communicate with one another trying to make sense of our lifestyles, our religious, politics, diet, exercise, educations, job skills. There's a lot of information to process. But we'll alwyas be ignorant of something and until we reach the point at which we might be a tenured professor or acknowledged expert, there is always some detail or nuance that we do not know. We are in an inferior class of skill or knowledge. But that is acceptable because of the Class Boundary Scrutiny phenomenon which makes us good sports almost by default.  

Except Stallman didn't respect that. He said, you should be like me. He is the diplomat scandalizing the Joe for his denim.

This is not about Stallman per se. It is about whether or not people can be safe in their ignorance. I say they should, according to gerneralizable class boundaries. 

You see, I have a choice on a Saturday night to go out and watch a popular movie in theaters, or stay home and watch videos of Richard Stallman and write arcane essays about my insights. The former unites me with the masses, the latter alienates me. Well, let me qualify that. Knowledge alienates only when it is applied with discipline. But whether or not that discipline is applied, I at least have an additional layer of dissonance between myself and others who are not possessed of that same knowledge. That is because it takes me time to learn it and it takes me time to explain it to those who have not learned it. That's the minimal amount. If I apply the discipline as Stallman does, it seems like self-righteousness until I preach.

So today, the young man in the video and I both learned a lesson about the fact that certain chipsets, hidden within machines that might claim to be open, are not in fact open. Stallman bragged about his open source BIOS. The very idea of having an open source BIOS never crossed my mind, and I'm a programmer. Naturally, if I applied the discipline, then I alienate myself not only from Apple fanboys, but from the people who are completely satisfied with Apple products. 

You see, if you are of a certain class, you have complete freedom within that restraint. How then could you be equal to any other human at a higher level? You cannot, but you pay the price with the implied contempt of the superior class, and you reap the benefit of the neglect of the superior class. You are not important enough to merit attention, and thus escape the brutal scrutiny of a would-be peer. Unless, you find someone who, like Stallman in the second lecture, is unctious with his contempt. Those are harsh words to apply to that particular lecture, but since much worse has been said about Stallman, I only use it to make clear the social nature of such a class boundary transgression. 

BTW, when I think of the epithet 'bastard' this is exactly what I mean. A bastard, someone whose father doesn't recognize them, is the recipient of the worst kind of contempt. The bastard never gets the benefit of the doubt, is obsequeous and defensive at once. At some point they either transcend and find peace within themselves or they become a Bastard, which is someone who harries the newbs without mercy. A bastard is thus a person who possesses no grace and offers no quarter. 

So you see in this regard we do and should use class to protect our honor and our ignorance. We can merit this by not being salf-righteous bastards but still make efforts to reduce the dissonance between ourselves and those who are more or less informed. It works both ways you see. You cannot assume that simply because something complicated that you don't understand is not going the way you expect, that you should immediately whip out the torches and pitchforks. As Chris Rock said, that's when 'keeping it real goes wrong'.

Obligatory Seriousness on Racial Bias, Silicon Valley & G+

Hey. Look me over. Tell me do you like what you see?

The difference between me, Prince and Steve Jobs is that those two care and I don't. I wouldn't write a song with a chorus 'Baby I'm A Star'. And I wouldn't pitch a hissy fit if somebody took my image out of my control. It turns out that there's a great line from De La Soul's 'Bitties in the BK Lounge' that says "I've got too much family to heed your threats". That says it all.

So when my existential partner Y asked me to write a few hundred on the subject in the Title field, I had to determine that I was going to do it as a favor and also because the chances of getting somebody like me to write is very slim - and people are going to assume too much about what I assume the others are going to write. But it's not because I particularly care about black images or what people are or are not doing to insure that there is some minimum level of black participation in this or that activity. That's so Bicentennial. 

From where I sit, there are people who get it and there are those who don't. The 'it' to which I refer is the arc of computing and the imperatives of changing the way humanity communicates, creates and thinks digitally. That's what this revolution is about. I'm one of the people who get it, and that is because I have a great deal in common with hackers like Steve Wozniak. But it takes zillions of dollars to implement visions of what's been in the air since Vannevar Bush. Which is to say the 'it' is as easy to understand as 'Put a man on Mars' or 'Put a babelfish in my ear'. I think there are at least a million people like me in America (which I suppose would put me in the 1/3 of 1%), and on the whole we get paid very well to do honest work engineering the digital future step by incremental step. But we don't get the zillions. Then there are 'great men' as in 'great man theory' who by a combination of extraordinary circumstances (I'm thinking very much of Outliers) get to make a fortune or two along the way to that future, stacking up dollars from very pedestrian projects, like licensing email servers, or building yet another app to 'connect' you with your 'friends'. Some days I wish I was one of those who get paid to get it, but I threw my lot in with Xerox, and you know that story. Inevitably, somebody starts counting noses and bank accounts by race in order to confirm or dispute the orthodoxy about racial progress in America. Yes there is a digital divide. I just described it.

Maybe I should have said that I have more in common with Cliff Stoll or Dick Feynman. Or maybe like Tim Berners Lee or Torvalds in building Git, I'm trying not to bask in glory. Either way, I'm like the many more millions of Americans who dreamed about being an astronaut back in the days when nobody made snarky jokes about the Marlboro Man, and when Buddy Baker drove 200 miles per hour without an airbag. Like them, I find great satisfaction, in a job well done. I'm a builder and I like getting the details right. 

When I started programming my version of Eliza in Basic, automated the high school elections and wrote a CB/Smokey & The Bandit Trucking simulator in Fortran IV all before my 17th birthday, nobody knew you could make money programming computers. There was no such thing as an undergraduate degree in computer science, and nobody was encouraged to play unless you were one of the kids in Seymour Papert's kindergarten. I was odd then; I also 'got it' the same way many of us 'got it'. But I didn't stand up and cheer for Giordi LaForge, and I never called Benjamin Cisko a role-model. All us computer geeks had an image problem, but there is no way to communicate through any sort of mass media what it is like to finally get that program to compile, or to get that database query running in 1/20th the time. You know what just happened a few weeks ago? I got the creator of Fortran Man to comment on my blog. That's exciting. I've been watching Dirty Jobs on Discovery Channel for years. Nobody has ever done one on tape apes. 

When you decide that you are who you are, it's nice to have a few people recognize you in truth. Even though none of us have been to Mars, I have no doubts in my mind that I am the man I was raised to be, and most of my modest ambitions have been fulfilled. In short, I don't see how I could possibly be angry that I am not some man that I am not - which is inevitably the kind of benchmark these racial nose counts end up counting. If racial equality means I have to be Larry Ellison, well you need to ask that question to Chuck Phillips, who - as black as he is, hasn't reached out to me or anybody I know. 

I happen to think of the social web as an enforced ignorance of Dunbar's Number - except that it's monetized. Every day somebody is adding me on Google Plus or Twitter because I'm one degree of separation from certain individuals who have thousands of 'friends'. Hip hooray for those who have figured out how to monetize friendships - you will get the audience you deserve. As for me. Well, I actually do like to spend time with my family. And now I'm going to do just that. Here's the picture. Tell me that I'm wrong.

Yeah, I got root. But more importantly, I got roots. 

--

Now I'm going to try to deal with the counterfactual which I would describe in the form of the following challenge. If someone were to offer me 2 million dollars to do a black startup, would I take the money? The answer is hell no, and the reason can be described in one word, Solyndra. I know how race works in this country, and I understand the presumptions about accepting money for trading in on you position in the race. You now have 2 million reasons to represent, and for me, that would become the biggest payday in my life. Eddie Murphy can afford to do that kind of clown movie, I cannot. I could never face my family saying I got paid for my looks and that's how I'm feeding you. Are you kidding me? And I know all the appropriate qualifications, but I couldn't stand the association or whiff of impropriety. To tell the truth, I couldn't even do it for black politics - and I was there. 

The Long Arc of What?

Years ago, long before and during the great academic battle known to insiders as Bernal vs Lefkowitz, black American academics were rather open in their admission that there was a great project afoot. The project was historical revisionism, and as I gather its intent, the idea was to occupy higher chairs of academic authority much the way that a prior (actually the same) generation occupied campuses during the 60s. 

The slogan of the movement was "Only when lions have historians - will hunters cease being heroes." And so the project to turn 'Eurocentrism' on its head with some Afrocentrism began in earnest. This occurred somewhere around the mid-80s when it was no longer seen as particularly novel for there to be any black American college professors. It was just before the start of the Cosby Era when I, and thousands like me made our ethnic presence known, welcomed or not, into and beyond the mainstream of American culture. No longer was it just John Landis producing Michael Jackson, millions of Americans were recognizing black talent in just about every walk of life. I took all that for granted, never doubted that this was the proper America. It was progress, to be sure, but I was as convinced that such progress was inevitable as I was about the computer's growing role in society.

I paid close attention to the leonine historians, the growing acceptance of Multiculturalism and the extent to which black culture was indeed something unique or just a rhetorical figleaf for raw racial interests. There was a lot to sort out. Splitting the difference between race and culture for me was like the debate between nature and nurture in the realms of describing intelligence. And much of that went by the key term of essentialism. There was and remains a fundamental difficulty with Americans navigating these roads for any transcendant reason, and that is basically the answer to the question 'who do you think you're talking to?'. The leonine historians considered themselves speaking truth to power and often purposefully went into dialect to make their points. You could call them dog whistles or crypto. but usually the message fell into the old rhythms of race raising rhetoric - for, of and by black Americans. So long as there was more than one group supporting such matters, as eventually became the status quo for American Studies, nobody would look too closely at the essentialist contradiction at the heart of the matter.

There is no literature for me, there is only literature. There is the stuff that inspires and that which transcends, or maybe it's all just a bunch of words. No matter what the truth of humanity is, it cannot be easily reconciled to specific literature. Today, the matter is too dispersed. You cannot tell with any objective accuracy what literature people are using in their heads to get along in life. So what the purposes of literature are, is subjective, as is most critical evaluation of it. You know good literature when you see it, and so too you know what stinks. Is it just a matter of taste? I tend to believe so. Just as I don't believe that in history, the 'great man theory' applies. I don't believe that particular artifacts of literature make or break a cultural center of gravity. The allies won WW2, but it might have easily have been Patton, or Montgomery who carved up Italy from North Africa. It doesn't much matter which. 

So when I think about what literature is 'necessary' for the advancement of ideas in support of a culture angled towards the politics of anti-discrimination, it doesn't much matter to me whether that literature is produced for a white American audience or a black American audience. From where I stand, it doesn't much matter if it's directed at Americans at all, living or dead. There is some essential truth that the literature must present and as far as I'm concerned it is either good literature or it is not. 

It brings me to question the surviving purpose of the leonine historians. And that is because now I am a crafty older man, I'm interested in finding out how wars are survived. When human beings survive war, then that is a good thing. Does it matter if it's Patton or Montgomery who wins? Only symbolically for those of us who are merely instructed in the history, long after memory no longer serves. 

 

I Am Not Your Friend

My cousin Star lives in a high rise apartment building in Manhattan. She's a commercial real estate broker, five foot ten and stunning. The first thing you notice when you walk into her pad is the large painting she made in the style of Basquiat, and secondly if the blinds aren't drawn, the New York skyline. I hung out with her for a week and learned a lot about her, and our family that I never knew. What I appreciate about her is that she is excruciatingly honest and not shy about anything. Of course she has a marvelous sense of taste and an engaging personality, but there are many things about us that are radically different. What I love about her is hard to define, but it's stronger than ever. 

This essay is about identity and some of the ideas I will take when I start looking at the right way to implement identity management. So the first reference you might want to consider is The Last ID.

--

It took Star all of three days to get to the point at which she was comfortable enough with me to perform two very annoying acts. The first was to force me to watch Loose Change, the hiphop video / obiter dicta comspiracy tape about who was actually behind the 9/11 attacks on America. I didn't realize that my cousin was a Truther and it took many hours for me to discover this, as close as we are. All the while we were watching this video that she had obviously not watched herself in many years, she kept voicing impatient concern that this might not be the proper version of the documentary. So while she is fundamentally on the Truther side of the equation, perhaps what she recalls being more convinced by something other than the exhibit in question. The second annoying act was for her to read, given my birthdate, my full horoscope and assert with confidence that it was quite accurate. In fact it was. 

I could go on about other evidence I have to support my prejudicial notions about the practicality of Star which is hindered by such poisonous superstition, but she's more than good people, she's family. And today, all of that evidence is none of your gluten-free business. In a town where advertisements for Moving & Storage have taglines (I am not making this up) "Rick Perry: That voice in your head is not God", she fits right in. 

--

I don't fit right in anywhere. So when I think of social media, as I often do, and in response to many such questions I reply "I don't have any friends."  So when I consider what's missing from social media and identity management it is the extent to which it does not identify the importance of certain of your traits with any bidirectional weight. 

If I cared as much about 9/11 today as I did when I was reading 'The Man Who Warned America' or 'The Looming Tower', I would have found my sojourn in NYC unbearable. As it stood, as I was referencing my iPad during the movie, I had a hard time recalling the name of that first book. If I had known somebody who died there that day, as Star did, the significance of the 'Truth' would be greater to me. So how could I adjust my affinity to such a 'friend' and still actually love her? It's easy to do in real life, but not done at all online. Star didn't even know what a Truther is, so it would not be something she would put in her profile for me to accept or reject in the first place. 

--

The context for what I'm attempting to describe as an affinity system goes under the label 'WWID' for What Would I Do? And the first thing that I say about it is that it is a self-generated 'purity test' whose results you own and then selectively publish. 

As oldheads on the internet know, one of the first viral documents was the Armory Purity Test. I took it about 22 years ago - that's an old document by internet standards. Well, it actually precedes the WWW; it was  on USENET. (USENET seemed so huge back in the day). So if you bother to take the test, you will recognize peculiarities about the set of questions. But what if everybody were the author and everybody were the test takers and all of the results could be stored in a document under your control? This would be the beginning of WWID, except of course that there would be literally hundreds of such tests and many thousands of questions brought to bear. One could imagine, based upon the matter of 9/11 one such test with 500 questions.

I propose a system of such generalizable tests with each individual question indexed and tagged and then correlated into bunches. These bunches over time may vary but the more popular questions will tend to be central in them. People will then take these bunches of tests at their leisure, answering one or some fraction of all of the questions and have their answers under their secure control. Then for the purposes of affinity, the user of the system may publish results under an anonymous avatar linked to their Last ID in order to make matches.

Tests may be generated for any purpose. They may be job appliations, consumer preference surveys, political push tests, religious fidelity tests, entrance exams, special knowledge competency tests, psychological profiles, intelligence tests or medical diagnostics. Anywhere there is a question with an answer that in some way can be used to identify some personal trait of an individual, this system can be employed. 

--

I am not your friend. But there is probably some subject upon which we could communicate a great deal for a couple of hours. I am trying to avoid short painful conversations, and engage long fruitful discussions. This tool would help a great deal more than Meetup + Facebook. 

Occupy Yourself

I've been annoyed by the flock of uninteresting people who have added me to their Google+ circles (probably under the caption of 'asshole') as I have made my snarky comments about 'OccupyWallStreet'. I have a message for them. The map is not the territory.

There may very well come a day this year when more people find a reason to get up, paint a sign, show up and yell in unison to the tune of marxist demonstration than to football games. I'm not particularly annoyed about the fascinating stupidity of football and the vast amounts of time and money the media spend covering it. So it follows that I shouldn't be annoyed by the much smaller crowds who are nowhere near as loud making their noise all over America. But there is something about the significance of people on the streets that cannot very well be ignored, despite the simple math and the apt comparison. 

What one hopes, as one always should, is that these vagrant outraged citizens can find some way to organize their passions constructively and integrate that into the proper channels of power and influence. After all, getting rid of the Federal Reserve is not something anyone possesed of wit attempts at those buildings. They do have bollards and armed guards because that's where the money is. But I suspect there will be many foolish attempts which will make for a good highlight reel. 

My liberal colleagues are always searching for 'teachable moments'. But why Ron Paul has come to hog some center of this attention demonstrates a defective syllabus. And I'm not too sanguine, given the sort of verbiage attaching itself in sympathy with this movement, that economic education is underway. But, that's what frenetic energy does. Maybe they will get some new and coherent candidates to pipe up.

In the meantime, they're just stinking up the joint, but that's what peasants do. 

That's My Old School

When I was a kid, Clifton Wharton was my hero. Hands down. I have never heard his wife before, but she's a marvel.

Playthell Benjamin's Open Letter

Posted without comment.

Dear Cornell

 

After reading your Op-Ed column on Dr. Martin Luther King in the New York Times, I felt compelled to sit down and write you a letter. Since the conversation that I want to have with you is about public matters i.e. the fate of our nation and the Presidency of Barack Obama, I decided to make it an open letter and put it on the internet so everyone can see it. I feel it is my duty to respond to your column because you are such an influential public intellectual and moral scold people listen when you speak. Like E. F. Hutton on finance, you da man with many people on matters of morality and politics. Since I have publicly pledged to praise saints, celebrate heroes, unmask charlatans and chastise scoundrels I could not remain silent. You have all the trappings of intellectual and moral authority – Harvard education, PhD, author of influential texts, able orator, Princeton Professor of Religion – but the more I watch what you are doing with these powerful assets…I fear you are squandering them my brother, and you are in danger of hurting us all with your folly.

 

The Last Economy

 

Evry 1nc ina while i wondr f teh intrnet is makng us stoopid. Bt mbbe itz jus chng. U no how kidz txt eachothr w abbrs n sht. Like nt even spelng words out. Still. U nvr no. Thngs chng. 

How far can the next economy go, and what will it be made of? Dunno. I cn tell u wht it wont b.

Good Comeback

Cracked me up.

All Mobs Are Similar

So I just finished skimming the US Air Force document on handling civil unrest, which outlines things like tactics for all levels of protest. The cool paragraph tells the story of how the planners of a protest decided to use women, children and the elderly as the body of the protest and called in media, expecting to get great coverage of riot cops busting putatively innocent heads. Instead, the Air Force sent in uniformed female officers who were unarmed. 

But the other thing is that I read all of the tactics and came to understand how three months of training could turn any reasonably fit man into a riot cop. And starting with the 36 inch riot baton, a helmet and a sheild, much could be done to suppress random violence. Random violence is what you can expect from a mob - anything more would be dealing with terrorists, which is what I would be by certain definitions, aware as I now am about US Air Force riot control tactics. Fortunately I'd much rather drive a convertible hot rod than go to anarchy school. 

On the smarter end of the engagement, I thought how exactly I might go about diffusing the pretense of civil protest, and while it runs quite afoul of the typical tactics and one strategic rule of riot control, I can't resist its possibility. 

Imagine that first thing in the morning of Day Two of the purported riots. You, as The Man, erect the following: In a large town square close to where things are burning and bricks are being thrown, you setup just that kind of unarmed female circular cordon. In the middle of that cordon, you have bright lights and cameras going 24/7 focusing on a dais setup in the middle. On the dais are a dozen judges, also preferably female and elderly hearing complaints from the crowd. If you have a complaint, then you must come in front of the lights and speak in public inside the cordon. Protesters are then realtimed into the permanent record.

How long could violent protesters garner any amount of sympathy from the public if such a dais were maintained? 

Reggie Watts

I couldn't make this up. What if you had an entertainer who was a combination of Bobby McFerrin, Robin Williams, Tay Zonday, Bobcat Goldthwaite and Stephen Wright? You'd have Reggie Watts on a bad day. This man is completely and totally spontaneous - even moreso than Eddie Izzard, but without Williams' mania. OK. Enough 'splaining. Just check this out. 

Socialists & Racism

If there is anything true about the epithet 'sell-out' it is that it doesn't take much financial renumeration to pull former comrades heads out of the collective ass of the collective. I prefer the term 'pinche vendida', which is most appropriate to the drama of the petit bourgiosie. 

There is a principle fallacy that I believe most Westerners adhere to and I am investigating it because of its many corruptions. Interestingly, it comes from a gut instinct I learned as a black nationalist in distrusting white liberals. The fallacy is that the middle class via political activism can make the poor into middle class. It ain't true, or at least it cannot be done without the sort of transfer of wealth on the pain of riots or similar legal fiat that I find reprehensible. At least some radicals have the honesty to say thier intent is to afflict the comfortable, another euphemism for "(fuc | soa)+k the rich". Understand that I find such honesty and aim to be an honorable calling, but make no mistake, I'm not on that side. 

With this in mind one must qualify any political program whose honest goal is 'upward mobility' for the masses (read 'deserving poor'). For the socialist program there is that interesting matter of race, and this is where the histogram above comes into play. Notice the particularly long tail of the households doing more than $75k. This is something I believe to be uniquely American, but I'm open to dispute about that. Still the real meat of this graph is the purple part with the 60% of American households doing less than 57K in 2005 dollars. I boldly assert (and here's where you can dispute me again if you care to) that this is where the Left is focused and sniffing up the ass of that Left, the mainstream anti-racists of America. The reason is because it is in this realm that racism has its greatest effect on the fortunes of Americans.

As anyone with a racial agenda will quote you, there is a well-known economic statistic about the fortunes of the white high school grad vs the black collegian with two years of undergraduate studies under their belt. I would be happy to remind you that people with such educational prospects, by and large don't often get past the 60%. I would think it amply fair to say that those people are about average. So when, on average, the white dude with highschool and the black dude with college are compared and this is given as proof of how racist America is, you are likely to get a shrug from me. Why? Because that level of achievement is not something I find particularly inspiring. But let us give the Leftists their due. In fact let us stipulate that this is the core of economic racism in the United States.

Those of you familiar with the film Brazil and Orwell in general should understand quite well how much energy has been spent spelling out the effect of dystopic authoritarianism on the fate of the common man. It is of course reasonable that the Left and Right focus on that meaty part of the histogram in the context of democratic politics. So how much social mobility does the entire program of the socialist program get to the meat of the American public? I'm going to be hugely generous, and say 25% And I'll tell you why I'll say 25% - because it's outrageous to think the American public wouldn't vote themselves a 25% raise if they could, or that socialists would smack down the capitalists among us to foot the bill if they could. While I'm at it, let's take a look at what credit the Left gives itself. If you pile those 150 things on top of each other do they add up to a 25% raise? Go ahead and add them up - it's really a great list. 

But I bet you that if you ask a black partisan how much of that benefit goes to their constituents they will still come back with a demand for the same half dozen things. Better education. Better jobs. Better healthcare. Better housing. Better policing. Better political representation. And they will tell you the bottom line is that right in the meat of that demographic a 25% raise would deliver all of that. Take a poll yourself. Ask a householder at 57K how much of that big list he'd give up for a $14,000 raise.

So what good does all the anti-racist agitation of the Left do their constituents? Very small marginal amounts that can only be measured in pyschic dimensions, which is about all the comfort I think they can give, because any marginal benefit to a middle aged householder in the meat(grinder) of the American economic demographic is good patronage. So if someone can be convinced that racism cost them a $2000 raise, well that's catastrophic economic structural racism - not really but you certainly have the attention of somebody in the the 57K demographic. 

How racist is the American Left? It doesn't matter because it's all relative. Like the hunter who doesn't have to outrun the bear, the American Left only has to be less racist than the American Right, by whatever measure because in the middle it's a game of inches. One notch over on the histogram is world historic for the man in the middle, and it is quite simple to show the operation of simple bigotry as monumental to the man of modest means. Black kids locked out of a country club swimming pool in suburban Philadelphia? Huge for the man in the middle. Monstrous for the poor. Asset forfeiture for stop & frisk in a single corrupt police force. Tragic for the man in the middle. Obscene for the poor.  

It doesn't matter whether the Left or socialists stop this bullcrap. It matters that they draw attention of their potential constituencies to these pint-sized atrocities. It matters that they will attempt to work on behalf of the poor who may not actually be beset by these problems, and that they will proclaim loudly that a $500 beef is RACIST!!! 

It has been a long time since I've been interested in anti-racist activism, and I have despaired of any hope. I recognize that the rhetorical patronage delivered by race hustlers is all that gets delivered. And I also understand what they fear the most, which is that by and large Americans in the middle won't give a damn about race. But it doesn't take much racism at all to keep them in the victimology business.

Kinda makes me yearn for the days of black power.

Conservative Cultural Criticism Made Clever & Hip

Trompe L'Oeil

Part of my intellectual curiosity dircles around the what I call informational thermodynamics. That is essentially a notion about the amount of energy required to keep a certain idea accurately alive in the minds of people. This is powerful enough notion but it is complicated by this, the fact of trompe l'oeil, which simply states that the human mind is subject to predictable failures.

These failures are part of our biology. The way we naturally think makes us take shortcuts. We abstract so that we can make up for the limited amount of brainpower we can muster at any time. What I hope is that Taleb's work will bear this out. Clearly he's ahead of the pack in his Fooled By Randomness (notebook). As much as we can know, many things are opaque, and man do I love his idea about intervention bias.

What occasioned this note is that I'm discussing jazz with Jewel and on the subject of Loussier we got to the object of Pachelbel. There is something classical about the fundamental chord changes of songs that humans find aesthetically pleasing. Oh snap. Now I have to read Benzon. But as the classic YouTube rant shows, Pachelbel is everywhere. 

--

Somewhat separately but related is puttering. When do our own idiosynchracies start to become obvious to us, even in our most intellective behaviors? I noticed this in my father the other day as he got his new computer and then proceded to become fascinated by the old photos that he moved onto it. He continued this routine about three times and I suddenly realized he was puttering. He remarks about how many thousands of pictures he has. He then says that some day he's going to really start organizing them. He then laments about what a huge and awesome task that will be. He start looking at one set of photos and gets engrossed. The next day he goes out and takes more photos. 

Last week he gave me 40GB of pictures with the admonition that under no circumstances should I load them up to the cloud. He doesn't want anyone to see them. His audience is himself. It has been this way for 15 years, I'm sure. 

--

And finally there is the observation that I tend to make more often that so much of global consumer culture privileges marketing. I do not chew gum, and I mean almost never. If I have five sticks a year I can't remember. But Ironman and I noticed yesterday that we have lots of different kinds of gum, and it's all in the packaging - but in the substance of gum itself, nothing at all is new in the past 40 years except for that new brand that can change flavor. Marketing, I now more completely understand, is the art of making the old seem new, to make the dull shiny. Transferrence is our predictable failure. 

 

Wonders and Signs

For the past two or three weeks I have been immersed in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has been a fascinating character study. I am still singly struck by the life of Jack Shaftoe who became great by winding up in a great number of scrapes. It is the kind of life I could not imagine for myself and  yet in a small way it is the amount of traveling and performing recondite tasks for forgetable bureaucracies that have made me. I like my work, for the kind of sense of completeness it gives when properly done, but I can't say that in the historical scope of things that my work, or anyone's work, much matters.

I've been reviewing at a high school level, which is about all anyone needs to know, the particulars of the Russian Revolution. Or more precisely the two revolutions of 1917. It is a wonder to think that any cabinet member of the Kerensky government in its three configurations might ever be considered at length. Who would know what it took to become the right appointee at the right time? Those close to those doing the doing would know, and most everyone else would never know. That's how the circles of trust have operated. 

I grew up in an odd time in American history, a time when most people believe and thereby gave permission to those who proclaimed that we lived in an era of progress. Moreover it was an era of scientific and social progress defined well in advance of the eventuality. All of the murals had the psychedelic colors of the future, round and pleasing like the shapes of the 7up Submarine. We had already decided what the future was going to be and were so sold on that vision that people still ask why certain dreams didn't come true? Where's my flying car? Where is the colony on the Moon? Where is fusion? Where is world peace? Why didn't the population boom happen? Why didn't Rachel Carson's predictions come true? Hasn't capitalism ruined the world? Why haven't we run out of oil? I once heard an excellent explanation of all this. It was the idea of Pop Culture. 

Pop Culture was more than just the simple thing we think of today. It was, in many ways, the ultimate expression of democracy. It was the idea that by making high artistic concepts accessible to the average Joe, in quickly recognizable forms, that we would extend the benefits of liberty, education and all of the previously exclusive intellectual and aesthetic prerogatives of the ruling class. This is one of those extraordinary ideas that's much deeper than the meta discussion of Andy Warhol. It's one we still grapple with, and I see its evolution in much fascination with network effects and smart mobs ideas which are influential with the digerati. 

So to circle back a moment, is it really true that a high school education is all we need to understand the Russian Revolution? At a certain level, yes. At a Pop Culture level this is probably true. We can all understand the negative connotations of 'Siberia' without reading Solzhenitsyn. Most human beings never will read him. But is that enough for the purposeful wisdom necessary to foreclose the possibility of embracing another version of Siberia? Probably not. 

Here's the other thing. As beneficiaries of real progress and the disintermediation of various gating organizations, we Americans have come to expect more personal power. We can all have in our pockets more compute power than the entire NASA space flight control center of the Apollo Program. We can buy the sort of automatic weapons and communications gear that could enable a single regiment to beat all of Lee's Army. But how would we communicate the wisdom?

I'm saying we could not via Pop Culture or through any but the most demanding disciplines. And that is the sort of thing one tends to believe after having read a 2800 page set of books, which oddly enough I didn't actually read completely - so much as read and listened to via audiobook - a combination I find quite compelling.

We must be suspicious of mass communications and recognize what our literacy demands. 

Mercury in Retrograde

We had a power outage this morning onsite. A thoughtful gent tells me that this might be related to Mercury being in Retrograde, which will continue to be the case until 8/26. I have seen enough systems to know that sometimes a dumb explanation is better than none at all, and immaterial causality is better than explicitly wrong causality. So I have begun to pepper my vocab with phrases like 'swing a dead chicken' and 'the plate in my head' more often. And even though I did buy a nice I Ching generator for my iPad, never have I considered astrology.

But do you remember this?

 

Wow. I know every lyric. And I used to swim in that soup as a teen. Incredible.

Bachmann's SAT Question

"Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President," 

Pick the response most accurately representing the author's writing.

• A) African-American families today are married less often than those in slavery.
• B) African-Americans benefitted from slavery.
• C) The Tea Party is racist, insulting and clueless.
• D) President Obama is responsible for the failure of black families.
• E) Marriage makes slavery acceptable. 

 

What I should have done was actually go out to different blogs and news reports to see the actual foolish conclusions drawn, but most of them are too long to sustain a coherent point. It's just another opportunity to play the game of morally superior interpretation of history. 

I don't know Bachmann, nor do I pay attention to her, but it's clear that she has walked into a burning building. 

Bokeh and Chromatic Aberration

So I've fallen out of love with the Fuji X100 and in love with the Olympus E-P3, but I still have a long way to go in figuring out how I justify spending 900 bucks on a camera. Things were much easier when the kids were little and you could satisfy them with small toys. But today my daughter is thinking photography will be her thing. She collects photos and graphics from all over the web and posts them to her blog, so I want to help develop in her a sophisticated eye. But I think it's going to be expensive.

We went to Samy's in Culver City last weekend and found for a modest $150 the great film camera bodies of old. Nikon and Canon 35mm SLRs. I reminesced. The guy behind the counter didn't take my bait - he wasn't in the mood to talk technical about the differences between this and that camera. Basically, if you're not going to spend 1000 bucks your choices are pretty limited and you can't expect a 60 year old man to give a snort. Within 20 seconds of me opening my mouth, he ran off into the back and brought back the $500 Canon Rebel Jr or some such, with all the lines on his face saying, OK just buy this now. 

Oh no, I'm not going to buy it now, I'm just wanting to put my hands on the thing so I can connect that to my online shopping and research experience, I shot back with the lines on my face. You are inferior to Amazon, that is unless you talk to me and explain the minute technical differences. But the fact of the matter is that we went in cold and had no real sophisticated questions. We were just nimrods wasting everybody's time. But now I'm armed with two technical terms that I can throw around and be a further jerk the next time I go. 

Bokeh is the characteristic of items in frame in the secondary focus area. Good bokeh gives such objects a soft blur, bad bokeh gives them an edgy blur. Chromatic aberration (is when) the edges of objects look prismified. 

In my mind's eye, my daughter is staring at negatives on a light table with one of those magnifiying jobbies that look like an upside down shot glass. In reality I can sense the need for a $1500 monitor for her new Apple computer and a ghastly amount of expensive software, on top of the 900 bucks for the camera I'm buying for me but allowing her to use. I can't put a price on the experience of passing along what I know about photgraphy, but everybody I need to buy something from can, and they will. 

I watched a couple videos which have completely demystified what goes on in a darkroom. I cannot believe how boring that is. It took 20 minutes to kill a lifetime romance with red lights and mysterious liquid-filled trays. Now that's done, I'm all about the digital. (Sigh)

Today Means

Today means small things in practice, and great ideas in theory. Great ideas that a large number of us do not fully understand. We pursue without really grasping the ideal of happiness. But we are happy enough.

I used to spend a great deal of time puzzling over what America is, how it operates, what it means. But it was only when I started to read more philosophy and history that I came to a reasonable conclusion. That conclusion is that we are a people more wed to our history than we know, and that history is of a more elevated character than we say. So we complain. We are people who have time to complain, meaning we are not defeated and we expect better for ourselves. 

This morning I picked out a paragraph from The Root, a publication of constant complaint. In The Root's consistency, they have re-published an article from one year ago today saying that it is just as relevant:

What, to a black American in the age of Barack Obama, is the Fourth of July? I answer: the day that reveals to him, more than any other, how much America owes to blacks and their struggle for freedom. If it hadn't been for people like Frederick Douglass, this would not be a country worth living in. The lofty ideals of the Founding Fathers would have been no more than stirring but empty rhetoric.

What I understand about this is the rigor with which my generation of black Americans view the world through the lens of inherited Struggle. We have aggregated every pain and triumph into an existential philosophy of lure and loathing. America. What does it mean for *us*? That is the question we love to endlessly turn in our heads. To settle for an answer that does not result in some strain of complaint is to admit a false comfort. We have in America, a permanent home as symbols of man's inhumanity to man, and it is such a powerful symbol that it is unlikely to ever be eclipsed. Except of course that our Spartacus has become Ceasar. 

We might have spent an eternity, were it not for Obama, speaking of Martin Luther King, Louis Armstrong, and Sojourner Truth. We might have spent 10 political seasons, were it not for Obama, speaking of Michael Steele, Colin Powell and Ward Connerly. All these proxies of fate, will in time, fade from significance, because of what America actually is, and who we actually are in it. Americans are only believers in the creed of liberty. That is all we ever were and it is all we ever will be. We are devotees, no matter where our location, to a set of clear ideas that we uphold like a flag in the wind only pointed with fleeting accuracy at its North Star. Whenever we tire, someone else picks it up, and the march continues. 

It has been a long time since I've listened to Premature Autopsies. But I never forget its observation that nobility can come from anywhere. 

Some people might ask, "What is this man doing talking about nobility? Doesn’t he know that this is a dragon-spawned and blood-encrusted century? Doesn’t he know that the dragon breath of our time is breathing down the neck of the year 2000? Doesn’t he know that this is the era of flash and cash?" I will say to them that the interwoven labyrinths of greed and manipulation are as old as the FIRST lie, When you lie you are trying to manipulate; and when you try to manipulate for false profit, you reveal your greed; and when you swallow that dragon dust cooperatively you reveal yourself as a chump, a sucker, one of those folks Barnum said was born every minute. But I will answer them also by saying that nobility is always born somewhere out there in the world, and when you live in a democratic nation you have to face the mysterious fact that nobility has no permanent address, you hove to face the fact that nobody has nobility’s private phone number. Nobility is not listed in the phone book. Nobility is not listed in the society column, nobility shows up where it feels like showing up, and where it feels like showing up might be just about anywhere. If it could rise like a mighty light from among the human livestock of the plantation, you know it can come from anywhere it wants to. You see, nobility is listed though. Yes, it is listed. Nobility lists itself in the human spirit, and its purpose is to enlist the ears of the listeners in the bittersweet song of spiritual concerns.

That doesn't sound like a complaint when you read it, but when you hear it played to the accompanyment of the New Orleans dirge in the cadence and accents of the black minister then you know - it is the bittersweet song of spiritual concerns. 

I am constantly reminded of the irony of those backhanded compliments such as the Root constantly replays when speaking of the Founders. You don't often hear many such complaining African Americans speak of their duties to lead with love the ever benighted white boys. The word 'us' is not often enough broadly employed. What does today mean to all of us? That is the question that should be turning constantly in our heads. If we were to forget all of the foolish self-serving rhetoric of identity, then we might recognize how many of the world's people believe in the creed of liberty.

I have brought my family to reside at the coast of the Pacific. When I was climbing my mountain, my throat was dry. When I reached the peak and saw the promised land, the waters of justice were still frozen in the snow. I recognized them for what they were and did not resent their color. Soon I saw the trickle, the stream, the mighty river, and I joined with all to find the mighty sea. I remember when I was parched and climbing, but I was destined as are all men, to rest here.  We are not truly Americans until we believe in liberty and justice for all. 

Digital Boogie

From ViHart, of course.

Apology to that Gay Brit

I was living in New York City when Richard Branson was in his heyday making Virgin Superstores here in the states. So within a week of its grand opening, I went to the new store in Times Square. Ooh shiny! 

As I wended my way through the brightly colored aisles, I happened into a very helpful individual who issued me a challenge. And as I sit doing overtime work this morning to the sound of a giant collection of Mozart, I am brought to mind of that challenge. You see I was looking for a particular classical song and I couldn't remember it. Well actually I wasn't but at the spur of the moment I thought I'd buy one, and so I was stuck with a mind splinter as he told me that he could name any classical song I could think of. Just hum the tune, he said, and I'll tell you what it is. 

These days, I hear that there's something of an App for that, called Shazam. And this smiling dude kept following me around waiting to engage his wonder twin powers. I was annoyed because I couldn't think, for the life of me, what classical song I might want to buy from this solicitous geek. I couldn't help myself and I couldn't help him. It was a lose, lose situation. A challenge issued that couldnt' be met. 

So lately I think of him as a homo. Someone with a genuine interest in doing me a favor that I can't think of a reason to want. 

Last week, my son, my wonderful son who uses YouTube videos to help him play ragtime music on the piano, asked me about Sonata #11. Except of course he was humming it and I knew it, but I couldn't tell you then it was Mozart or Sonata #11 aka K331 aka the Turkish March. You know it too. Everybody knows it, but doesn't know that they know it. 

I should have done something to meet the Virgin dude halfway, because I was genuinely pleased to have been put on my heels by the request. He was bored as he could be in his shiny hell. As you can guess, the center of gravity was somewhere Kris Kross and Sir Mix-a-Lot. We obviously had that boredom in common, and now there are no more Virgin Superstores. It was an idea that came and went like a tornado sweeping up the goods from those who live in cultural trailer parks. But for whatever enriching value classical music has, there was that. Shazamming oneself at home doesn't compare favorably.

Now we're all in the circle of Mozart love, but how can anyone forget Baby Got Back?

 

The Definition of Big

The Atheists' Burial Ground

..from these honored dead we take increased devotion...

My new favorite TV show is River Monsters. Now that I have a new DVR that can hold 70 hours of HD, I might just get more episodes of everything. So I'm recording the marathon for this weekend. In the last episode I watched, I watched him listen to the tale of a busload of people drowned in a plunge into a river teeming with piranas. He winced in the company of the eyewitness. He doesn't appear to be the sort of fellow, who would merely do that for the camera. In fact, one of the things I like most about the host Jeremy Wade is that he's quite genuine. Not a guy for the cameras, or for the fakery. I admire his salt.

I'm considering ignoring most of the gnu atheists and their arguments but I can't help but jab every once in a while. I probably confuse atheists with humanists because essentially the loud ones keep explaining how much more savage religious people are. I percieve loud atheists to be the ones spitting on graves and mocking the hallows. So I wonder if any bother to draw logical lines. 

I Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond movie, Bond's seeming best pal is an ex-agent named Mathis. When he is killed, and after Bond kills the killers, Bond unceremoniously shoves his body into a dumpster. Bond's horrified date makes a remark to which Bond replies, "He wouldn't care." And his real name wasn't Mathis. I imagine atheists wouldn't care where their carbon atoms go, but I wonder how disciplined that particular lack of care would be. 

Why not desecrate atheist bodies, or better yet bury them under a Star of David for spite? Why not leave them in the open air at the crossroads for the ravens to pick? How about dumping their body overboard in the dead of night and never producing any evidence of their death outside of a hasty press release? 

I don't know how long a buried body has a right to its peace. The law is subject to regionalisms, but it is an interesting part of the law which is probably largely unexamined in perhaps the same way marriage law was before the homoactive began their plotting. There is certainly ample low hanging fruit for the Dawkins' dorks to deconstruct. 

I'm having second thoughts about criticizing the amorality of legal positivism. For all the Godless, cultureless, and clueless need some edifice upon which to justify their grubby self-interests; it might as well have the imprimatur of law. Call whatever statutory mumbo that comes out of the political sausage machine jumbo and the peasantry will salute. It creates order and passes for civilization. 

The stupid little atheist whipping boy in my head is confused about honoring the dead because he belongs to the cult of youth and  school of libertarian hands-off good will toward men. There is nothing in his universe worth sacrificing a life for, except perhaps the 'reproductive freedom' of his zipless galaxy of doable chicks. But he should know that nobody will come to his funeral if it coincides with some frothy secular event, like turn off your cell phone for an hour to save the planet day and his friends miss the tweet. His mother, poor blighter, is Eleanor Rigby. 

Gil-Scott Heron: Dead

There is a poem by Nikki Giovanni that sums up in about 25 lines everything I think about black consciousness. I could write about it for years, but the essential thing to say doesn't take more than 30 seconds. There are lyrics in a song by Lionel Ritchie that sums up my confidence that I would grow to be the man I expected to be despite all the odds. There's a song by the Isley Brothers that puts me immediately at peace every time I hear it. If I didn't know better I might say that everything I needed to know about black culture could be summed up that way. 

Once upon a time I didn't know better, and in those days it was important for me to find a way to express every emotion and cultural concept in my shared black language. I called it, as I finished my last experiments in it The Well-Wrapped Universe. I would never have to use any metaphors besides those invented in the 'hood to communicate my humanity to all of humanity - and as Earth Wind & Fire said, "If you don't understand me, it's your fault."

I knew I was being selfish even as I over-exaggerated self-referentially in post-modern blackness as a 'Boohabian persistent black object'. But it was still charming and fun in the 90s. I felt the beginning of the end when I found myself, a bit to my surprise, across in Europe trying to make myself understood. I knew I couldn't be so persistent when I found things I was looking for in Borges' poetry and in the lamentations of Chinua Achebe and spiral tales of Carlos Fuentes. Yeah, I was that multicultural. 

The problem with Gil Scott Heron is the same problem as with John Cheever. It's the same problem as with Issac Hayes and with Jesus Christ Superstar. He's too damned specific. It's like saying New Orleans and then humming When the Saints Go Marching In. You can't get away from the fact that Gil-Scott Heron wrote 'Angel Dust', 'Whitey on the Moon' and 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'. You might want to think of Curtis Mayfield in some broader context than the Superfly Soundtrack. You might want to try to extend the cultural significance of The Wizard of Oz, but it's still always "I'll get you my pretty, and your little dog too". And Vince Geraldi will always be Linus and Lucy and Mikey will always be Life Cereal and Wil Wheaton will always be Ensign Crusher. Forever.

Issac Hayes is the big bald black man who made the ungh sounds of the 70s like a natural man was supposed to. And Jesus Christ Superstar made all pop culture Jesus freaks and hippies approachable for a moment. But what I didn't know when I was 13 years old was that those symbols wouldn't last forever and explain more about the world than just that moment. It was hard for me to accept that Kwai Chang Caine's grasshopper lessons wouldn't serve me long after the show was canceled - especially when I learned that role was supposed to be for Bruce Lee. 

And I began to become resentful of all the things I knew to be true but only for my Well Wrapped Universe. I began to hate the fact that the world couldn't catch the flavor and it didn't want to study. That there is what Gerald Early calls lure and loathing. But I played in all sections of the orchestra, and mastered all the languages and idioms. 

Still. I was prepared to hear that Marvin Gaye's 'Whats Going On' was not the greatest album ever recorded. I was prepared to hear that Alex Haley's Roots was not the greatest American story ever told. But it was hard to give up the arcane gems. It was hard to have to explain The Last Poets. It was difficult to remind people that LA had KDAY, KGFJ, KJLH and KACE, each a different flavor of black radio. And as time went by, it was disappointing to explain Yellow Back Radio, you know, and break it down. It was painful to read High Cotton alone. It was ridiculously hard to give up on explaining George C. Wolfe and so now I explain the real killer. 

The real killer is when, above and beyond the Well Wrapped Universe you find superior examples. It's like dissing Michael Jackson in 1982 when John Landis was just discovering him.

So I look back on Gil Scott Heron and what can I say? He was deep to me as a teenager when I sat in the back of the bus and recited him and Richard Pryor like the perverse psuedo badass I was, or pretended to be. When the world was ruled by The Funk, and when Issac Hayes said ungh, you said ungh back. When you looked with admiration at the matron in the white uniform and 14 inch arms who stood in the back of the church and swung a mean tambourine; when the hardest working man in show business dropped to one knee and the sweat on his forehead let you know he was The Godfather; when all you had to do was say Aretha and everybody shutup. That was the day for Gil Scott Heron and all the ghetto poets of America. When Flip Wilson was preaching in The Church of What's Happenin' Now. When the New York Times used slang words to let the reader know that a Negro was speaking. That's when Gil Scott Heron's message to the masses was a thing to hold in reverence. When everybody had the expectation that some wino had more humanity in him than the President, when hippy dippy weathermen were funny, when you were excited to see Goldie Hawn  pop out of a little door and say 'sock it to me'. That was then. 

It's all so specific that unless you're over 40 years old, you probably have no idea of half the things I'm talking about. Just like I didn't get Bugs Bunny jokes about A ration cards or victory gardens or the aphrodesiac powers of nylon stockings until I went and studied. 

You can go and study Gil-Scott Heron, but his world is over. It's just taking up space in a part of my brain I don't use much any longer. His voice is coming out over the transistors of my old leather covered Federal radio on 1230 AM, hot times soulin' on the weekend, KGFJ.

A rat done bit my sister Nell
and Whitey's on the moon.
Her arms and legs began to swell
And Whitey's on the moon.  

There's some things you remember for which you'll never need Google. I'm prepared to accept those things only mean something to me, and only because it used to mean something to the me I used to be. That's what it means not to be televised. 

Quote of the Day

John Burroughs argued that the tendency to blame others was the ultimate admission of failure. It was an acceptance of the inability to change one’s destiny and therefore the belief that someone else was in the control of it. -- Belmont Club

Coolest Electric Bicycle Ever

Just wow. I want one. Check out the gears on this badboy.

Illogical Hateration for the Other King

This weekend I went cruising through the old 'hood looking for people who have forgotten me and I have forgotten. This time, for the first time in a while, I felt that my hooptie was a bit too shabby to show off. But I was feeling very good anyway. My old street looks small, but maybe that's because more people have cars parked on it. I suppose that's a good thing. 

I spent the most time at Rancho Cienega Park. Sometimes we called it Rancho, but most of the time we called it Dorsey Pool. l spent a lot of time reminiscing about the good times we had there and most significantly about the great moment I had remembering something in particular about the pool. I have several fond memories of the place, but I just want to go into one which was about the lifeguard. I will never remember his name, but he was one of the first young adults I met in the neighborhood that had visions beyond. I remember one time that he walked a bunch of us over to Thrifty and bought us all triple cones, and it was no problem for him. He was nice, he was cool, he was smart. But most of all, he understood jazz. So he would play stuff like (I presume) Roy Ayers at the pool instead of the normal stuff. But there was one particular song that he played that I loved. I remembered the intro for many years afterward but never knew the song. Like the beginning of Flashlight or Strawberry Letter 23 there was that palpable excitement. It couldn't less than 25 years later when I discovered that the song was by Herbie Hancock, a version of Watermelon Man, now as then one of my all time favorite Jazz Fusion songs. But I'll always remember The Lifeguard at Dorsey Pool.

But I don't have any similar memories, nor am I inclined to consider many about the person of Celes King III who died at the age of 73 in 2006 - give or take. I did know that he occupied this building on Santa Barbara and then King Boulevard right next to a police station, and like many other mysterious men and women of color was said to be one of the great leaders of Black America by such publications as Ebony Magazine. He was a bailbondsman and from that came his fortune.

Celes King III was many other good things, but from my point of view no great thing. If I knew the name of The Lifeguard I would name Dorsey Pool after him, but as it stands it has been named after Celes King. Somewhere in the annals of the meetings of the bureacrats of the 10th District there is the glorified set of whereas clauses that show why above all other men in history that pool should be named after Celes King. Such words will never be emotionally compelling to me. I just won't be able to get over the fact that he made money as part of the "Prison Industrial Complex". 

I know he was CORE. I know he helped a lot of people. In fact, I think he was a Republican too. I have that vague feeling that I wrote about him somewhere back in the mists of time. But Google doesn't remember and there is no Wikipedia about the man, so I speak my ill and that's what we get. 

The Rancho Cienega Pool was by far, the most beautiful building in my neighborhood. It cost a quarter to swim there when I was a kid and 50 cents if you were over 18. Now kids under 18 swim free and adults cost 2.50. There used to be three panels in the roof that could retract and let the sun directly in, but that mechanism has been broken for decades. And oh by the way right next door are the Arthur Ashe Tennis Courts at which Venus and Serena spent a lot of community time doing clinics, or so I'm told. So King is in good company. One day, they may restore the pool to its former glory. I hope so, and maybe King's good name might aid in that restoration. But I tell you what. I hope I get to be that big a millionaire first, then they could rename it after me. 

A Note About Royalty

In my world of thinking, I tend to agree that men are motivated by three things: Fear, Glory and Greed. This is an old idea of Aristotle's or somebody whose name fits into that same ancient bucket. Is interchangeable with Honor to my way of thinking, and in a small enough community, all your honor is glorified. But for the majority of us peasants, most of our good deeds go unnoticed. 

In these days of fame and media celebrity, one can be glorified without being particularly honorable. That is something of a problem for peasants who don't realize their position as peasants. After all, if you can get rich by being a buffoon, what is the point of dignity? Part of the Peasant Theory is to remind us that rights are a gift of the strong, and we must attend to whether the strong are righteous or else we will find that our 'rights' are merely arbitrary favors. Therefore we must consider with our own best thinking whether the strong are actually honorable. 

Not so much in American meritocracy, but in much of human history, ordinary people are bestowed titles and honors by the powerful, and the powerful are often royalty. We are fortunate to understand that royalty is expected to be honorable, and therefore there is honor in service to royalty. It does sound awfully feudal, and it is. We humans understand feudalism in its essence - I would say that it is something we know innately. We study history attending ultimately as to whether kings were bad or good. It is the focus of all our literature, broadly speaking. 

So all of us in the English speaking world ought to have some interest in the goings on between this or that royal family. While I confess that I've been completely out of the loop in that regard for the sake of honor, we all ought to be as interested in the Royal Wedding as we are with any major election in the West.

 

Tracked!

If honesty is the best policy, then here are the facts that my iphone knows about my whereabouts. It's actually not that scary is it? 

If you haven't heard, our illustrious new Senator Franken has decided to go after Apple for having this information on your iphone. It being somewhat persistent give an opening to those of us concerned with privacy. But here's the thing - once again. If you go to a restaurant and pay with a credit card, you are giving information away to a complete stranger, or two or three, as it changes hands. Are you that interesting? Is your money? Is your location? Sure it's easy for hackers to get your info, just like its easy for mechanics to steal your car.

My point is, no matter how important your private information is to you, it's even less important to the overwhelming majority of people. 

It turns out that I found some fairly interesting things about my Mac and iphone today with regard to where stuff goes on my machines. Also, the best guess is that the information that persists is done in error. All this app that takes my data to this visualization has is a few days of information. I was actually hoping for a lot more to show up, but maybe I did something wrong. Either way, I'm pretty much broadcasting from Foursquare anyhow.